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The industry leader in emerging technology researchSat, 17 Feb 2018 13:00:39 +0000en-UShourly1Under Mayer, Yahoo stands by ad tech and Right Mediahttp://gigaom.com/2012/09/06/under-mayer-yahoo-stands-by-ad-tech-and-right-media/
http://gigaom.com/2012/09/06/under-mayer-yahoo-stands-by-ad-tech-and-right-media/#commentsThu, 06 Sep 2012 14:15:23 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=559918After months of speculation that Yahoo (s YHOO) might part with ad exchange Right Media, the company is going out of its way to affirm its commitment to its core ad technology.

In a mini media blitz of stories in the ad trades today, company executives said Yahoo has no plans to let it go.

“We just want to go on the record … Yahoo is committed to being a primary player in the ad technology space and Right Media is part of that strategy,” Michael Barrett, Yahoo’s chief revenue officer, told Ad Age.

And, according to the ad news outlet, the directive to clear up confusion about the future of Right Media came right from the top.

“When I first met with Marissa, I told her, ‘Hey, the last couple of months have really been very negative toward the future of our ad-tech stack,'” Brian Silver, Right Media’s chief told Ad Age. “She said, ‘Then we have to ensure that we get out there and tell them it’s just not true.'”

Over the past few months, as the future of Yahoo itself has been a question mark, several reports have surfaced rumors around the sale of Right Media. Most recently, AllThingsD reported in June that as part of his plan to fashion Yahoo into a media company, interim CEO Ross Levinsohn was considering outsourcing Yahoo’s ad business to Google (s GOOG), Microsoft (s MSFT) and AppNexus or Pubmatic.

In addition to commenting for the first time on the Right Media rumors, Yahoo is also trying to play up its investments in the ad exchange. While some observers say Right Media has languished since its 2007 sale to Yahoo, the Sunnyvale, Calif. Company plans to publish a blog post later this morning showcasing recent improvements.

While the company wouldn’t confirm a number, Ad Age reported that other industry insiders have said Yahoo plans to invest at least several hundred million dollars into Right Media and other parts of its ad tech stack.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2012/09/06/under-mayer-yahoo-stands-by-ad-tech-and-right-media/feed/1Try, try, try again: will ad-funded mobile ever work?http://gigaom.com/2012/07/05/samba-will-ad-funded-mobile-ever-work/
http://gigaom.com/2012/07/05/samba-will-ad-funded-mobile-ever-work/#commentsThu, 05 Jul 2012 11:56:42 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=539634Say hello to Samba, a new service that launched in Britain this week that wants to give its customers access to fast mobile broadband for free.

Free? Yes, free.

The proposition is enticing: once users have bought an inexpensive Samba SIM card and perhaps a dongle too, they can get their 3G data for nothing.

How it does this is pretty straightforward. Samba’s an MVNO that runs on the 3 (s HWL) network and is aimed largely at laptop and tablet users on the go. The twist is that it’s ad-funded, so while users don’t pay with their wallets, they pay with their attention. Watch two and a half minutes of adverts in a day — from brands like Volvo, Microsoft (s MSFT) and Dell (s DELL) — and you’ve worked up enough credit to cover more than 500MB of data.

“With Samba you earn the credit watching ads at a time that is convenient to you and then have access when you need it,” co-founder Ben Atherton told the BBC. “It also marks an end to that hunt for a coffee shop, pub, hotel or library to get online.”

Sounds interesting, and — like Free Mobile in France — another example of attempts by European companies to alter or disrupt the existing operator model.

There’s a fly in the ointment, though: yes, MVNOs are having a resurgent moment, but the world of ad-supported mobile isn’t a wide open plain: it’s a graveyard stuffed with the corpses of companies that thought they could do the same and failed.

Blyk days

The biggest example of prior art here is probably Blyk, an ad-funded MVNO which launched in the U.K. in 2007 to greatfanfare. The idea was similar to Samba, but it was focused on a different segment of the market: young people who were heavy talk and text users and didn’t mind seeing ads in order to rack up free airtime.

The company (which still operates out of Finland) had strong credentials: it was run by former Nokia (s NOK) president Pekka Ala-Pietilä and advertising guru Antti Öhrling, and staff included Marko Ahtisaari, who is now Nokia’s head of design.

It brought in a swath of high-profile advertisers and got a ton of press, and it made a big push: I remember seeing an army of Blyk street marketers trying to get people interested in the product in my hometown, which has a big student population. After six months or so, the company claimed 100,000 users.

But in the end it struggled. The U.K. operation closed down in 2009, and now, instead of being a consumer-facing brand, it focuses on advertising technology and partnership with European networks like T-Mobile (s DTE) and Orange (s FTE) and India’s Aircel.

The conclusion? Ad-supported mobile services are a tough, tough business.

Ads can work — for a lucky few

There are plenty of other businesses that exist through ad support, of course.

Some are bigger money spinners than others (TV versus news websites, for example), but most of them aren’t purely ad supported at all: advertising is just one part of a complex revenue mix. And when you’re talking about online services, ad supported media can be really tough — music services like Spotify have found it a difficult thing to pull off, while in video, the vast difference in revenues between a subscription service like Netflix (NFLX) and an ad-supported one is a big reason reason Reed Hastings has rejected buying Hulu in the past.

Advertising platforms, on the other hand, can be extremely powerful: think Google (s GOOG) or Facebook (s FB). These are appealing to advertisers because they are self-service, highly-segmented, and targeted. They make money because they scale easily, they don’t necessarily require huge sales teams and they aren’t broadcast mechanisms.

In an online world where the value of advertising is decreasing all the time, Samba not only needs to convince users that it’s convenient to watch ads in exchange for data — it needs to know whether it’s actually an ad platform or simply a channel disguised as a platform.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2012/07/05/samba-will-ad-funded-mobile-ever-work/feed/2Adaptly launches reach amplification ad product, raises $10.5mhttp://gigaom.com/2012/05/09/adaptly-launches-reach-amplification-ad-product-raises-10-5m/
http://gigaom.com/2012/05/09/adaptly-launches-reach-amplification-ad-product-raises-10-5m/#commentsWed, 09 May 2012 13:00:31 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=519434Brands put plenty of time and money behind the content they share on social networks, but only a small percentage of their intended audience may actually ever see it. In fact, at the first Facebook Marketing Conference in February, Facebook executives said that, on average, content posted to Facebook pages reaches just 16 percent of a brand’s fan base.

But Adaptly, a New York-based startup that gives brand advertisers a consolidated platform for buying ads across social media networks, today launched a product that it believes gives brands a new solution.

Called Evergreen, the product spots the best-performing pieces of content posted by brands to social networks and converts them into native advertising to reach more of a brand’s current fans, as well as other targeted individuals.

“Just because a brand has a million fans on Facebook, it doesn’t mean that they’ll actually see any given piece of content,” said Nikhil Sethi, CEO and co-founder of Adaptly. “The Evergreen system is designed to close that reach gap.”

At launch, Evergreen is only available on Facebook and to Kraft Food brands. But Sethi said the company will ultimately make it available to more brands and expand the product to other platforms within the next two quarters, as the reach issue isn’t specific to Facebook. On Twitter, for example, where content moves even faster, the average reach is less than one percent, Sethi said.

In many ways, Evergreen is very similar to Facebook’s Reach Generator, which guarantees that, for a fee, brands will reach 75 percent of their fans on a consistent basis and boost engagement by a factor of two. Sethi acknowledged the similarity but said Evergreen is available to brand advertisers of all sizes (not just those with at least 500,000 fans, which is the minimum for Reach Generator). He also emphasized that it will eventually work across platforms and allows brands to target specific audiences (for example, people who like chocolate ice cream or live in a certain geographic location).

To make sure that only the best content is pushed out to the larger audience, he said, the system evaluates how far each piece of social content is traveling on its own and only promotes the posts that pass a predetermined threshold of organic reach.

“Organic reach is almost like social’s quality score,” Sethi explained.

$10.5 million in new funding to fuel expansion

On Wednesday, the company also announced that it had raised $10.5 million in Series B funding, bringing its total funding to $13.2 million. The new round was led by Valhalla Partners, with participation from new investors Time Warner Investments and Vivi Nevo. All of its previous investors, including First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures, and kbs+ Ventures, also contributed to the round.

For most of Adaptly’s existence, Sethi said, the 50-person company has hired heavily in engineering, relying on just one sales staffer. But the the new capital will help ramp up its sales team. He added that funding will also go towards product development and international business development.The company declined to disclose its number of clients but said it focuses exclusively on Fortune 100 brands.

At the moment, Adaptly’s platform includes Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and LinkedIn (s LNKD), but to keep up with the rate at which social services are scaling and developing native ad products, Sethi said the company’s plan is to add one to two new platforms every six months.

Recognizing the global popularity of Facebook, as well as the success of platforms like Tencent in China and Mixi in Japan, Sethi said that it will increasingly look to expand its business overseas.

“If we believe that ads follow eyeballs, there’s a big opportunity out there,” he said.